Biography Comes of Age

By Gerald Clarke

The house of literature is in its usual state of disrepair. Poetry is depressed, the novel remains in the shadow of James, Joyce and Proust, and an aging Tennessee Williams is still the greatest living playwright. But wait: there is a light burning in the attic window. Biography is alive, well, and scribbling away, better than ever. The banners may not be waving in college English departments and the critics may not be cheering quite as much as they should, but we are now in a golden age of biography. Indeed, all but half a dozen of the greatest biographies in the language have been written in the past 25 years.

Just look at the list. In American politics and history we have James Thomas Flexner on Washington, Dumas Malone on Jefferson, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. on Robert Kennedy and James MacGregor Burns on Franklin Roosevelt. The British have given us Elizabeth Jenkins on Elizabeth I, Cecil Woodham-Smith on Queen Victoria, Philip Magnus on Gladstone and Edward VII, and Robert Blake on Benjamin Disraeli. In literature there are treasures from both sides of the Atlantic. Richard Ellmann's Joyce, George Painter's Proust and Leon Edel's James are the chief prizes, but there are many other jewels, including Michael Holroyd on Lytton Strachey, Francis Steegmuller on Cocteau and Quentin Bell on Virginia Woolf. Moreover, the past year has brought a host of distinguished and bestselling additions to the collection: William Manchester island-hopping with Douglas MacArthur, Edmund Morris galloping up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt and Barbara Tuchman wading through the wars and devastations of the 14th century with the Baron Enguerrand de Coucy. No wonder Holroyd exults: "Biography has come of age!"

Pity all those readers who had to suffer through its prolonged and tedious adolescence. History's original biographer was Plutarch, who lived, appropriately, in the 1st century A.D. If the definition is stretched a little, the entire New Testament might be considered an example of the art. The first real biography in English, however, did not come until 1791, when James Boswell published his Life of Johnson, which is still the classic by which all others are judged. "Be there a thousand lives, my great curiosity has stomach for 'em all," exclaimed Boswell; his nosy exuberance sends the pages flying. His contemporaries devoured Boswell with as much enthusiasm as we do, but he made them uncomfortable: he was too candid, they thought, too explicit about Johnson's faults and foibles.

That squeamishness only intensified during the Victorian era, blighting the whole form for the next 120 years. "In every picture there should be shade as well as light," said Boswell. The Victorians, however, wanted, or claimed they wanted, to hear only good about their heroes. The historian Thomas Carlyle was an exception; he instructed his own biographer, James Anthony Froude, to put down the truth about him. But when he died and Froude did just that, telling how sour, self-centered and occasionally violent the great man really was, half of England denounced Froude as a scoundrel and a traitor. Biographies were popular in both Britain and America throughout the 19th century, but few modern readers could or would endure them. Speeches and letters were quoted at enormous length--a life of Lincoln ran to ten volumes. Authors were expected to remain discreetly behind the curtains, without a voice or point of view.

Lytton Strachey had both, and his Eminent Victorians, which made fun of those letter-writing idols, delighted post-World War I readers, who wanted to hear the dirt about the people who had brought on the disaster. Strachey was imitated throughout the '20s and '30s and, wrote Bernard De Voto, "biography seemed to be no more than a high-spirited game of yanking out shirttails and setting fire to them." That game is over. In the past generation the best biographers have righted the balance, creating what approaches a fresh and vigorous art form.

Biography has always been a demanding discipline. "It is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one," said Strachey. A good biographer should combine the skills of the novelist and the detective, and add to them the patience and compassion of the priest. Few people want their shortcomings exposed (biography has added a new terror to death, complained one 18th century writer), and they, or their heirs, often go to considerable trouble to hide them. Somerset Maugham asked his friends to destroy his letters; both Willa Gather and Ernest Hemingway inveighed against posthumous publication of theirs.

Charles Dickens burned thousands of letters while his sons roasted onions in their ashes, and Henry James destroyed 40 years of correspondence. Walt Whitman carefully tore pages out of his notebooks, altered the sequence of his love poems so that no one could figure out to whom they were addressed, and wrote in code the initials of his lovers.

Besides being given to wiping away their past, many people, particularly writers, are prone to fabrication. Mark Twain could not resist a good story about himself, even if he had to make it up; William Butler Yeats dressed in colorful myths; and George Bernard Shaw found simple facts insufficiently expressive.

"He declared that a literal account of anything is neither true nor false," wrote his biographer, Hesketh Pearson. "And so, in order to achieve essential truth, he would embroider an episode and sometimes even invent one, as in his account of dancing around [Dublin's] Fitzroy Square with a policeman in the early hours of the morning."

Very often the erroneous stories see print, properly buttressed by improper footnotes and references. Yet, if he persists long enough, the biographer can usually ferret out the facts about anybody.

Dickens and James made bonfires of their letters, but many more remained--11,000 in the case of Dickens, 12,000 in that of James. Indeed, sometimes the danger is not too little information, but too much. Inexplicably, Lewis Carroll kept a register of letters written and received, amounting to 98,721 between 1861 and 1898.

No wonder the White Rabbit had so little time; he was always at his desk grinding out those damned letters.

Until fairly recently, sex was still a sensitive subject for biographers. Now, naturally, there are no rules.

We have learned that Joan Crawford, Tyrone Power and Errol Flynn, those sex symbols of the '30s and '40s, swung both ways, and that E.M. Forster and Somerset Maugham were homosexuals. The whole trend makes Barbara Tuchman, for one, uncomfortable.

"The major change in the writing of recent years," she says, "is the belief that the public has a right to know about a public person's private life. I don't think the public has that right." Tuchman was therefore confronted with a dilemma when she was researching her life of General Joseph Stilwell, who had written an unmistakable, unambiguous "None of your damned business" on the top of his diaries. To peek or not to peek was Tuchman's question. She swallowed hard and peeked. The experience has taught her a lesson, however: she has destroyed her own private papers. Says Tuchman:

"I don't think I would wish to have my life pried into, and I don't intend to leave anything behind except my professional work."

Tuchman is less Victorian than she sounds; had she been writing about F.D.R., she admits, she would have mentioned his mistress. The public has no right to pry into private matters, but the biographer does. If this causes distress, the writer should turn to a gentler profession. The biographer may wish to leave out the raw details, but to omit the earthy facts about a person is to leave out half the life. Virginia Woolf would seem less real to us, for instance, if Quentin Bell had averted his eyes, as he very nearly did, from her lesbian relationship with Vita Sackville-West. R.W.B. Lewis cleared up several mysteries surrounding Edith Wharton when he told of her strongly incestuous feelings for her father.

Yet sex is only a small part of the biographer's problem of selectivity. The best biographers borrow from fiction.

They decide to examine their subject's character and show the connecting threads that run through his life.

Whole months and even years may be dismissed in a page or two if they fail to add significance to the pattern. "Uninterpreted truth," said Strachey, "is as useless as buried gold." Too many facts, paradoxically, obscure the essential truth and overload readers, causing a brownout somewhere between eye and cerebrum.

Even if they are not worshiped, facts must be respected and treated with kindness. Or, as Critic Desmond MacCarthy phrased it: "A biographer is an artist who is on oath." Unfortunately, artists are as rare in this field as in every other. Too many biographies, particularly those written by academics, are more like collections of facts than books to be read. Sometimes, it seems, it takes as long to read a life as live one.

When a reader steps into a novel, he is walking into the writer's imagination. When he opens a biography, he is entering two lives; the subject and his biographer are like twins who will remain together until the pages turn to dust. In his newest novel, Dubin's Lives, Bernard Malamud examines this peculiar relationship. "How curious it is," says his biographer hero, "that as you write a man's life, how often his experiences become yours to live. This goes on from book to book: their lives evoke mine, or why do I write? I write to know the next room of my fate."

Stanford Professor Peter Stansky, whose own biography of Gladstone has just appeared, describes writing a biography as "an act of homage. You love and are committed to this per son even when he is acting like a fool." The biographer must be close enough to sympathize, but far enough away to see clearly, to explain but not to defend or attack. He is literature's high-wire performer. A false step this way or that and he loses his balance -- and his book.

If he walks the wire, however, and reaches the other side, everyone is rewarded. Though he may not be around to enjoy it, the subject has been accorded that rarest of all human gifts: understanding. And the book buyer has more than a good read. He has a life to examine: someone was here before him, suffered and was happy, did foolish and wise things, endured. Biographies will be read as long as people remain interested in other people. --

Gerald Clarke

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